Judge Procter R. Hug, JD ’58, who served as chief judge of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals from 1996 to 2000, died this past fall at the age of 88. His wife, Barbara, his high school sweetheart and the love of his life, predeceased him by a few months. They were married for 65 years.

Judge Hug represented so much that was exceptional about Stanford Law School. He was a brilliant and nimble lawyer and a scrupulous and modest jurist who cherished community, whether it was his beloved Nevada, Stanford, the Ninth Circuit, or the federal judiciary.

I served as a law clerk for him in 1996–1997, immediately after he was elevated to chief judge of the Ninth Circuit. We sometimes put too much stock in judging as a performance, and Hug was not big on performance. But from him we can learn a great deal about what kindness and decency mean in a national figure and how effective they can be. In a tribute to him delivered in 2002, Senator Harry Reid, D-N.V., described him as “the most effective advocate and defender that the Ninth Circuit has known in Washington. He can truly be described as the man who saved the Ninth Circuit.”

During my time as his clerk, I saw him devoted to fighting to keep the federal circuit court from being broken up (an effort that peaked in the 1990s but has resurfaced under President Donald Trump when he began to lose in that court). Hug publicly pushed back on circuit-splitting efforts by offering tireless testimony before congressional panels, speeches, op-eds, articles, and meetings, over and above his caseload and ministerial responsibilities required in wrangling the court itself.

For some of that period, I served as the most useless speechwriter and op-ed drafter in judicial history: I would dutifully hand him incendiary and polemical drafts and in a day or two I would receive in return his gentle but comprehensive rewrites, always in plain English, stripped of hyperbole, unerringly respectful, and often humorous. An ideal law clerk melts rhetorically into her judge, learning to channel the judge’s voice until the two writing styles merge. It took me a long time to understand that Hug’s uncomplicated, unadorned style of legal and political writing was his gift to a polarized Congress fighting to polarize the courts. The major effort to split the circuit ultimately failed on his watch.

Hug was born in Tonopah, Nevada, in 1931, where his family ran the local telephone company. He was an exceptional student, varsity athlete, and a champion debater. He met his wife, Barbara, at Sparks High School when he was a senior and she was a junior. He was selected as the school’s “Most Outstanding Boy” in 1949, and Barbara was selected “Most Outstanding Girl” in 1950. He excelled in sports and civic activities and attended the University of Nevada, Reno (UNR), where he was student body president, graduating in 1953. Barbara served as student body secretary.

He served as a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy (1954–1955) and then attended Stanford Law School, where he was on the law review and graduated in two and a half years. He took and passed the Nevada bar exam before finishing law school. His stories of his early years in private practice from 1959 through the 1960s in Reno were the stuff of legend, but from the hodgepodge of family law battles, contract disputes, and his work representing UNR, he developed a reputation as a gifted and successful advocate. In 1977, he was elevated by President Jimmy Carter to a seat on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. He loved being a judge, and he was doggedly fair and understated. His lodestar was understanding the story and getting it right.

Efforts by puffed-up clerks (like me) to have him take bold political positions against the death penalty were gently rebuffed. The death penalty was the law. And it was not his job to disturb that.

As I wrote at the time of his death, it borders on impossible to write an obituary for a great man who genuinely believed that he was ordinary. But Judge Hug was a gentle steward of a court full of huge personalities with clashing agendas. Whenever drama flared up within his court, he managed to cool everyone down, usually with twinkly humor and the gentle admonition that everyone was better than that. His superpower was that the people around him, including life-tenured judges, actually strove to be better than that, because it was what Hug seemed to expect from them. Most everything I learned about leadership I learned because Hug’s boundless humility made space for the vast talents, odd quirks, occasional egos, and frequent brilliance of the jurists around him to crackle and thrive. It took me years to understand that this was perfectly intentional on Hug’s part.

His clerks revered him. He taught us to unlearn jargon and to write in plain English. Any hint of derision toward another jurist on the court in a dissent was not permitted. Ryan Cobb, who clerked for Hug in 2007–2008, told me this in an email: “I learned the importance of respect and integrity, especially in public service. He taught me that to be truly successful in life, both professional and personal, you must live with integrity. You can see it in his love of family and his profession. In a tribute offered when Hug assumed senior status a few years ago, the current chief judge of the Ninth Circuit, Sidney Thomas, who has known him since the late 1970s, said this, which perfectly captures what Hug meant to so many of his admirers: “One of the questions posed concerning John Adams was how he would fare as a modern leader. I don’t know the answer to that question, but I can state with a fair degree of certainty that Procter Hug would be a great leader in any generation.” Thomas then went on to add, “Proc is the kind of person, and the kind of leader, who makes everyone around him better. His warmth, optimism, vision, intelligence, eloquence, quiet perseverance, and sense of humor made him one of the most effective chief judges that we have known.”

Above all things, including his cherished Nevada, Hug loved his family. Conferences in his chambers in which we went over the day’s current events—and ample caseloads— included loving updates on the activities of his grandchildren. As Sidney Thomas concluded in his remarks about Hug, “Proc and Barbara are the people we all hope to be and, in a greater sense, what we hope America is. They are not only among the best of their generation, but among the best of any generation.” SL